Workstation spec for Compositing & Rendering

I went to 1 computer shop and the salesman suggest to me this spec against what i posted earlier

CORE I7 3960X
CORSAIR DOMINATOR GT 2133C9 (4X4GB)
ASUS SABERTOOTH X79
CREATIVE X-FI TITANIUM HD
ASUS DVD/RW SATA 24X
HITACHI HDD 2TB 7200RPM SATA
CORSAIR F240 FORCE 3 SSD
LEADTEK QUADRO CX VGA CARD
CORSAIR AX850W PSU
CORSAIR 600T WHITE CASING
CORSAIR H100 HYDRO COOLING

Any opinion? Is this the best there is?

Alright, I might change the casing to something better. Since the computer is actually for compositing and rendering 3d/2d animation I thought the sound card is a better addition.

For the motherboard, I was told by the salesman that the board was more stable compare to other current board for that cpu socket. Honestly im not that sure about it and Im still looking for alternative.

Will air cooler be efficient? since the computer will be up rendering some project maybe more than 2 days.

Basically for 3D/2D animation rendering from what my animator told me. For software I think using adobe creative suite

Okay, and I see you're upgraded it to 16 GB RAM. That will help when rendering from After Effects, make sure that AE is set to launch multiple render threads.

However, I would NOT get the Quadro CX. a GTX 570 would be much faster (figure at least 3 times faster) at 1/3 the price. You only need the Quadro CS for the Adobe Creative Suite if you're running Adobe CS 4 and using the Elemental Technologies encoding accelerator (which only works under CS4).

Heh... um... you really buy into that?

Adobe apps won't use any of the additional features that you get from a Quadro (antialiased lines and slightly better at handling high polygon count situations) and the output of Premiere's GPU acceleration had better look the same between dissimilar cards. After Effects renders its final output on the CPU so the 'quality' of the GPU is pretty irrelevant for AE rendering. Adobe states that the 570 and 580 are both fully supported in Premiere Pro and After Effects CS 5.5 with no features that would be unsupported by not using a 'Pro' card.

You'd be surprised to learn how many visual effects shops (especially shops working on TV instead of feature films) are just using 'gaming graphics cards' instead of Quadros...

If you're going to be doing a lot of after effects rendering, then the $900 price difference between the graphics cards would be best spent on a render node instead. Another system do do rendering is going to get more done.

If you must get a quadro, for some percieved reason, then please look at something more current. The Quadro CX is ancient. I know it was pushed by Adobe and NVidia for Creative suite use.... when CS4 was the current version. It has 192 CUDA cores, and was fabbed at 55 nm- which puts it in the same class as the Geforce GTX 260, a card that came out three years ago. A Quadro 4000 is more current, faster and cheaper.

You should buy the latest and most powerful quadro you can aford .

Gaming cards are not optimised for the kind of math needed to render

Not true. At all. Especially for an outdated Quadro CX.

Unless you're seeing a really impressive price on a Quadro CX, I definitely wouldn't get it.

If you wanna cool the CPU with water to make it more stable for long periods of under load use I would go with something simple. It can't really hurt to watercool any system. It's just a matter of how much money you wanna waste doing it. For what you are doing I think a simple closed loop system will be perfectly efficient and cost effective at the same time. You could consider the Corsair H60 or H80 series or the Antec 620 or 920 setups. All of them will work for what you are doing. They will keep your temps lower during load and keep them more stable over longer periods of load time. Just my opinion on the matter.